Chapter 12 - Blood On The Nursery Monitor
"Code Black! Lock the perimeter!" Marcus roared into his lapel communicator, his voice tearing raw against his vocal cords.
He didn't wait for the security team. He drew the concealed Glock 19 from his shoulder holster, kicking the glass door fully open as he surged past me into the corridor. I was right behind him, adrenaline coursing through my veins like liquid fire, completely blinding me to the blood trailing from the cut on my ankle.
A mother does not think. A mother does not negotiate with fear.
We sprinted up the spiral oak staircase. Every shadow in the vaulted hallway looked like a crouching assassin. The security lights suddenly flickered, plunging the second floor into a sickening, strobing emergency red.
*Click. Click. Click.*
The sound of the smart-locks disengaging echoed down the long hall. Someone had overridden the mainframe. The multimillion-dollar biometric security system Marcus had installed wasn't keeping the world out; it had trapped us inside with whatever had just breached the nursery.
"Stay behind me, Khloe!" Marcus snarled, throwing his shoulder against the solid mahogany door of the nursery.
*BANG!*
The door flew inward, rebounding off the drywall.
Marcus cleared the corners with his firearm raised, his tactical training taking over. "Clear left! Clear right!"
I lunged past his shoulder straight toward the white wooden crib in the center of the room. My heart hammered against my ribs so violently it felt like cracked bone. "Hope!"
The crib was intact. Hope was lying on her back, wrapped in her pale pink swaddle, her tiny chest rising and falling in deep, untroubled slumber. But when my eyes swept across the mattress, the scream locked in my throat, choking me.
Resting just two inches from our daughter's sleeping face was a single, blood-red Christian Louboutin stiletto.
The heel was razor-sharp, its patent leather gleaming under the crimson emergency strobe. And impaled directly on the spike of that five-inch heel was a glossy, high-resolution ultrasound photograph—the very first scan we had ever taken of Hope, the one that had vanished from my hospital bedside drawer the night I went into premature labor.
Written across the black-and-white image in dripping, dark red lipstick was a single word:
*MINE.*
"She was here," I whispered, the room spinning around me as my knees threatened to buckle. "Marcus... she was in this room. She was standing right over our baby."
Marcus rushed to the window. The reinforced safety glass was completely intact, but the latch had been unlocked from the *inside*. On the glass pane, drawn with greasy greasepaint, was a crude smiley face with an arrow pointing directly downward toward the courtyard below.
Suddenly, the nursery monitor on the changing table crackled back to life.
"Look down, darling," Isabella's voice chimed, melodic, mocking, and laced with absolute insanity. "You always were so slow to understand the rules of high society. Did you really think you won because some judge banged a little wooden mallet? The Vance dynasty doesn't belong to a low-class surrogate with good luck. It belongs to blood."
Marcus grabbed the monitor, his knuckles cracking under the pressure. "Where are you, you psychotic bitch?! If you touch my family again, I will tear you apart with my bare hands!"
A low, seductive laugh echoed through the tiny speaker, accompanied by the muffled roar of a high-performance twin-turbo engine idling nearby.
"Check your phone, Marcus," she purred. "I left a little housewarming gift in the East Wing garage. You have three minutes before the timer hits zero. Let’s see who you love more—your precious little bastard, or the five hundred innocent people attending your charity gala in Manhattan tonight."
*BEEP.*
Marcus’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, his face draining of whatever color remained. The screen displayed a live streaming feed from the underground garage beneath the east wing of the estate.
Strapped to the support column directly beneath Hope’s nursery was a commercial-grade military explosive, wired into a cellular detonator.
The digital countdown was already at 02:41.
"Marcus..." I gasped, scooping Hope out of the crib and pressing her against my chest, covering her head with my arms as maternal instinct completely obliterated my panic. "Marcus, what do we do?!"
May you like
Marcus looked at the bomb timer. Then he looked at the window. Outside, through the heavy fog rising from the ocean, two red taillights flashed twice near the perimeter gates—and then sped off into the darkness.
"She didn't come to kill Hope," Marcus whispered, his eyes widening in sudden, horrific realization. "Not yet. She came to clear the board."
